Welcome!If you are an EMULSIVE contributing author or Patreon supporter, please login using your email or user name. If you're having problems, please first reset your password, then get in touch using the contact page.

Welcome! If you are an EMULSIVE contributing author or Patreon supporter, please login using your email or user name. If you're having problems, please first reset your password, then get in touch using the contact page.

Camera review: the Olympus IS-5000 bridge camera – by Tom Perry

2002 was a funny time for film cameras. Technically, they were as good as they could get in terms of specs – most SLRs were autofocus, with multi-zone metering, wide ISO ranges and decent shutter speeds.

Compact cameras had become much better in terms of metering and autofocus, and some were crammed with features and modes to compensate for the lack of manual control. But with the digital revolution kicking off, all of this felt like the sound of deck chairs being dragged along the deck of a sinking ship while a meteor fizzed towards the Earth (and Godzilla filed his nails).

That said, it is in the interest of business to get maximum returns from their investments. In the camera industry, that means varying the offer to consumers while wringing out every last penny of value from completed R&D.

Bridging a gap

Enter the Olympus IS-5000 bridge camera. It comes in the classic Olympus champagne finish, which tends to mark easily. My copy has a few bumps and scrapes, but that’s to be expected: it’s a teenager!

Olympus IS-5000

Bridge cameras offered almost everything the industry had to give at the time – apart from fast lenses and extreme focal lengths. A full, almost dad-cam, feature set: fresh-looking ergonomic designs, weight saving from not having to drag a bag of lenses around, full manual control in high-end models, close enough in others.

And Olympus was the bridge camera master.

Olympus IS-5000 – Back

The IS-5000 is built around a 28-140mm f/4.9-6.9 “5X” zoom lens and does everything it says it does, but the controls are a bit fiddly: tiny push buttons fill the left-hand side of the back, and in manual mode, you are required to press a small button in to change shutter speed instead of the aperture. You must do this while looking at the back – so you have to recompose. This is a design flaw. What this camera needed is a dedicated aperture control ring or an additional thumbwheel to serve the same purpose.

The camera has four exposure modes:

Program AE

Aerture “preferred” AE

Shutter-speed “preferred” AE

Manual

In addition, when using the camera’s Program mode, four additional modes become available: Full Auto, Stop Action, Portrait, Night Scene, and Landscape.

Darkness falls

The viewfinder is darker than most SLR finders, thanks to that slow lens, and the 85% coverage feels a bit tighter than an SLR too. There’s enough information to shoot with (shutter, aperture, exposure, focus confirm, etc) but focus points don’t light up in the viewfinder.

There is a clever feature which I like though: out of focus areas are stippled in the finder – it’s a perfect way to show depth of field and it is very useful for composition. No need for a DoF button here.

Olympus IS-5000 – Lens

The lens is slow and doesn’t find focus well in low-light. The brochure for the IS-5000 describes the 28-140mm f/4.9-6.9 lens as a “masterpiece of optical design that delivers astonishing crispness and clarity”. It also notes 15 elements in 10 groups, with an ED element.

While it is worth remembering that most sales patter like this means close to nothing, it’s also worth noting that the lens design wasn’t knocked up one afternoon down the pub. Even if the lens is slow, it is pretty sharp across the frame when focused.

Well-lit interiors are fine, but any less bright situation will find the lens hunting often. There is no manual focus, so if AF fails, you are stuck. The camera is noisy to focus, and noisier to zoom.

It also has six straight aperture blades, fine when shot wide open or stopped down one stop, but the bokeh isn’t great past that. Portrait mode keeps the aperture wide open whenever possible – as the lens isn’t quick, this was the mode the camera lived in for most of the roll you see featured here (Kodak Pro Image 100).

Tiny niggle about the lens – externally it is all plastic and screw in filters can be over-tightened. I can see this has happened on my copy through a section of thin cracks on the outside of the lens.

Film choices

Having tested this camera with Kodak Pro Image 100, I would now consider 200 ISO an absolute minimum film speed for everyday use with the IS-5000. The shutter speeds were so low at 100 ISO that even in fairly good light, I was wondering if my pictures would suffer from blur from camera shake at the far end of the zoom range; a few did.

At this point, it is worth noting that Olympus had already built an anti-shake technology in other cameras – a warning system that also prioritized shutter speed to reduce camera shake. The Mju III series is a good example of this implementation.

That feature is not in place here and would have been handy. Perhaps it would have been implemented as a feature on the next model had the burgeoning digital market not killed the line.

Bottom line: is the IS-5000 a keeper?

I think so. There are lots of nice features (Spot metering? You had me at date back). It’s light, and the lens doesn’t distort too much through the zoom range. It isn’t perfect by a long shot but does cover a lot of ground in terms of what it can do.

If you can find one, I think it’ll work for a long time. The date-back stops recording at the end of 2032…

Share your knowledge, story or project

At the heart of EMULSIVE is the concept of helping promote the transfer of knowledge across the film photography community. You can support this goal by contributing your thoughts, work, experiences and ideas to inspire the hundreds of thousands of people who read these pages each month. Check out the submission guide here.

If you like what you're reading you can also help this personal passion project by heading on over to the EMULSIVE Patreon page and giving as little as a dollar a month. There's also print and apparel over at Society 6, currently showcasing over two dozen t-shirt designs and over a dozen unique photographs available for purchase.